Sherri Fisher, MAPP '06, M.Ed.,
Director of Learn & Flourish LLC, is a leader in the field of positive education. An education management consultant and coach, workshop facilitator and author, Sherri uses the POS-EDGE Model to incorporate research-based findings from strengths psychology and behavioral economics into positive, personalized, best-practice strategies for learning, parenting, and work. Full Bio. Sherri's articles are here.

Does it matter whether we can identify the underlying mechanisms by which a positive intervention appears to work? Well, yes and no. In the short term it may be enough that something works. But if we want to repeat an outcome, then it is important to know why an intervention was successful.

Positive Interventions and Coaching Clients

Seligman and colleagues found that the Three Blessings Exercise, the Gratitude Visit, and Identifying and Using your Signature Strengths in a New Way each had positive and lasting effects. But many people are only convinced by their own personal research, no matter how well-regarded the scientists or promising their approach. Many teenagers fall into this category. Ones I see as an educational management coach often have multiple learning and emotional issues and reject the help of many well-meaning teachers, counselors and family members. They are often experts themselves: at learned helplessness and manipulation. They need positive interventions, but you can’t exactly tell them that you know some great ones to try. What can you do with clients who are resistant to the kinds of change they really do need?

Some Mechanisms of Positive Psychology

Some of my teen clients needed the outcome an intervention like the Three Blessings could deliver, but it would need some tweaking. I began by asking them to tell me something good. At first I did all of the writing, noting their observations on the appropriate day in their assignment books, under the heading “Something Good.” For the first few sessions, something good was about avoiding responsibility. “There was a fire drill.” “The bus was late.”

Happy Teenagers

A few sessions later I got to add two questions to the prompt. I now asked for them to give me three answers. What happened? What was good about it? Why did it happen? The first few responses were variations on a theme: “The bus was late so I missed English. It was good because my essay was not finished. It happened because I needed an extra day.” Within a month, though, the students were hooked on writing their own lists, volunteering the answers each day. Eventually they included things like “My friend came over after school. It was good because we played my new video game. It happened because I got my homework done right away.”

Happiness

What was underlying the interventions success? According to Lyubomirsky and colleagues, about 50% of happiness is hereditary, but only about 10% of our happiness is the result of circumstances, the category where one can place random events like having substitute teachers who cannot do math, fire drills that interrupt the history test, and late bus drivers who spare one from turning in the first period essay. Kids who have school struggles, however, often count on these random events to help get them through the day. Since about 40% of our happiness can be affected by intentional activities, setting goals, making choices, and developing self-regulation are important happiness skills. So does this mean that good things in your life are not all random? Well, as a matter of fact, yes!

Pathways and Agency

The late Rick Snyder talked about creating hope through pathways and agency. He defined hope as “a thinking process in which the person clearly conceptualizes goals, but also perceives that s/he can produce the pathways to these goals (called pathways thinking) and can initiate and sustain movement along those selected pathways (called agency thinking).” While hope theory has an emphasis on conceptualizing, the initial change for the clients happened without their conscious goal-setting or planning. However, the results were magnified once they realized that their own behaviors (getting homework done) were actually causing good things to happen (having friends over).

Self-Efficacy

Albert Bandura showed us that self-efficacy is required in order for a person to stay focused on a task in the midst of perceived setbacks. People who lack self-efficacy are less resilient and may not see themselves as having the ability to effect the changes that would result in success. People who develop self-efficacy are more likely to attribute their lack of success to insufficient or misguided effort. They are more likely to continue to set and reset goals and to believe that they can overcome adversity. The students became more self-efficacious, both socially and academically. Regarding resilience, see Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism (Great synopsis here by Dave Shearon).

Self-Regulation

Baumeister’s research suggests that self-regulation, choice, and decision making in one area have positive effects in other areas, too. Muscles get stronger with use, and so does our ability to self-regulate. In the beginning, I was setting lots of the goals and doing a significant amount of the planning. The clients had to answer three questions and do their school work. Eventually, they wrote the three answers each day. Once this became a habit, the students were more self-regulated enough to set simple goals and connect their behaviors to a desired outcome. They also noticed that the outcomes for random events produced only a short-term gain.

Self-Determination

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s “Self-determination Theory” identifies three innate psychological needs–competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When these needs are met, our self-motivation and emotional well-being increase. When they are not, motivation and emotional health suffer. At the beginning, the clients were somewhere between being not motivated to change to perhaps being externally motivated. Compliance may have been the result of parental requirements, grades, or coach’s requests. The coaching goal of helping the students to become more independent, more self-regulated and more engaged in their work required making a direct connection between causality (their own behaviors) and positive outcomes. Improvements in relatedness likely occurred as a result of improved school performance which benefited relationships with teachers and parents.

Chances are that many mechanisms were at work for the students. Unpacking these is what Positive Psychology researchers are doing. Creatively repackaging them is what coaches often do. In coaching we may take an empirically validated intervention and change things about it such as the prompts or the structure. Of course, then it is not really the same intervention. But when we take an intervention and customize it for a particular person because we understand some of the underlying mechanisms at work, we are creating “applied” (as opposed to “theoretical”) interventions. This is the beauty of Applied Positive Psychology as it is taught at MAPP. You will find numerous examples of this in the articles of various authors right here at the Positive Psychology Daily News.

10 comments

JeffMarch 5, 2007 - 5:14 am

Fantastic work, Sherri! This sums up what I had known intuitively and through directly observing my high school students, particularly the “tough ones” with academic and behavioral challenges. You are speaking to the fact that every situation is constructed a little bit differently. Some students find thinking of good things boring or trite. Come to think of it, I find some of the exercises pretty corny, but with a little tweaking and creative juice it is possible to recreate quite a bit of the same benefits in context.

The burning question is how do you assess for your desired end (better student learning and performance and ultimately happiness) without a lot of permission slips, administration buy-in, parental buy-in and student willingness to accurately self-report? Put another way, how do you as a classroom teacher change the culture positively?

1) How do you assess for your desired end without changing the bureaucracy?

Work with everyone involved with the student (parent, classroom teachers, guidance counselors, psychologist, etc.)! I get to use positive interventions and strengths approaches with people who don’t even know it sometimes. Everyone who feels they have a stake in the case can have a voice. Since I work directly with the student, any positive and self-efficacious outcomes that make the work of all of those stakeholders easier (fewer meetings, e-mails, accommodations…) is usually welcome.

It can be tough at the beginning, but progress is usually only turned down by people who have a vested interest in the student failing. (Unfortunate but it happens.) Everyone likes to take credit for a success! If you are in special ed, you will have to follow the IEP, but you also get to have a fair amount of leeway in how you reframe the directions, materials and outcomes for a student.

2) How do you as a classroom teacher change the culture positively?

This is often very frustrating for people who are not positional leaders. Principals and superintendents are, by the nature of the beast, the “big picture” people. It can seem like a soft or fuzzy approach to increase student well-being when AYP says they need higher math and reading scores that you can measure-measure-measure. My advice to you would be to choose the school where you will work VERY carefully. Find a principal and SpEd director who share with you their vision for a higher achieving school. Find out how they think that happens. Want to make a difference now? Don’t rule out an independent school where your creativity can be less at odds with NCLB.

Meanwhile, there are lots of cool ways to integrate strengths approaches into the classroom. I have even turned positive therapy models into journaling assignments where the students learn to assess the underlying motivation for character behavior. Kids love to give advice to characters who don’t “get it”, and they learn about some of the mechanisms in the article above in the process. Having lots of flexible tools in your teaching kit is essential. A good sense of humor is probably mandatory if you are working with adolescents!

Sherri, in addition to your wonderful synopses of PP researchers, I loved what you wrote at the end of your article: “But when we take an intervention and customize it for a particular person because we understand some of the underlying mechanisms at work, we are creating “applied” (as opposed to “theoretical”) interventions. This is the beauty of Applied Positive Psychology as it is taught at MAPP.” You articulated beautifully what I’ve been struggling to convey – thank you! I’d also add that when you combine decades of experience in a particular domain (in your case education & my case business) with an understanding of the underlying mechanisms, it’s impossible not to want to “tweak” things to best meet the needs of your clients. Thank you again for a really thoughtful piece!

Sherri:
There is a professional speaker by the name of Clint Swindall who believes in the ability of “tell me somethin’ good”. In fact, in the speaking world he is known as the “Tell Me Somethin’ Good” guy. He even has products. I have 2 of the t-shirts and a mousepad. Talk about thinking positive everytime I look at the mousepad I get a smile…I have the link below. Maybe we can spread the word one shirt at a time. 🙂 Everytime I wear one of my shirts I get asked what it means…that’s all I’m going to say about that. 🙂

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